Call centers often employ a number of agents for handling inbound and outbound calls. The nature and purpose of the calls may vary greatly over a short time. For example, outbound calling campaigns may involve originating calls to collect debts, solicit donations for a non-profit organization, or offer new products for sale. Agents assigned to these campaigns must be familiar with the appropriate debt collection practices, the non-profit organization for which donations are sought, or the products being offered for sale. These same agents may also be involved in handling inbound calls, and may be required to answer questions associated with various products, customers seeking service, etc. These agents must be trained in a variety of areas, including trained in operating the call center computer workstations, interacting with other customer information systems for updating customer records, researching product features, or for being familiar with guidelines and policies associated with a telemarketing campaign. Additionally, it is not uncommon for employee turnover in call centers to be relatively high, requiring continual training of new agents.
Training of the agents is important, since training increases their effectiveness. Failure to train an agent can result in a poor customer service, loss of revenue, and other adverse impacts. Thus, an efficient and effective infrastructure for training call agents is necessary.
Training systems for providing computer-based learning allow each agent to receive training in a manner that suits the agent's schedule. Some training systems are designed to be locally executed on the agent's computer while other training systems can be hosted on a server and provided to the agent via network interconnection.
However, such training systems are not integrated into the call center infrastructure and cause additional administrative burdens to coordinate training between the agent, call handling systems, and the training infrastructure. Thus, the administration process of accomplishing agent training is distinct from scheduling the agent for their work schedule, and when the training break arrives, the agent cannot seamlessly transition from handling calls to receiving training, and vice versa. This can increase the complexity and cost for the call center provider, in addition complicating the administration of training both for the call center administrator as well as the agent.
Thus, an integrated approach for administering training to call center agents is required, and it is in regard to this and other aspects that the present disclosure is presented.